About Us

Welcome! We are Maria Alexandra Vettese (MAV) and Stephanie Congdon Barnes (SCB). We live 3191 miles apart in Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon.

We first discovered each other online in 2005, when blogs were fairly new, and quickly developed a friendship based on a shared love of film photography, art and craft, everyday beauty and a well-lived domestic life. On January 1, 2007, we began our first year-long project together, posting diptychs—a photo from each of our mornings—at our blog, 3191: A Year of Mornings. We enjoyed the experience so much that we followed that project with a year of evenings using the same format. We were thrilled when Princeton Architectural Press published our mornings project in book form in the fall of 2008. That book, titled A Year of Mornings: 3191 Miles Apart, is now the only place you can view the mornings diptychs. Our follow up book, 3191: Evenings, was printed in a limited run and is now completely sold out.

In 2009 we turned our attention to our blog, 3191 Miles Apart, sharing stories, recipes, and projects along with our photographs. The online archive of those six years will be available again online very soon. (Sign up for our mailing list to find out when it is up.). We found we missed seeing our photographs in print, however, and launched a subscription-based publication, 3191 Quarterly, in 2010. 3191Q was published four times a year through 2014.

In 2015 we started something completely new. We spent the year documenting our lives for a book—sharing photographs, stories, recipes and crafts in a month by month format covering our lives and inspirations during January–December, 2015. We are thrilled that the new book, A Year Between Friends: 3191 Miles Apart – Crafts, Recipes, Letters and Stories, is now available from Abrams. As of mid-2015, we continue to post these simple moments, now photographed on film, from our everyday lives throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you for joining us at 3191 Miles Apart! We hope you will enjoy what you see.

xo MAV & SCB

MAV

Maria Alexandra Vettese is a Portland, Maine-based freelance art director who also works in the mediums of photography and design. She is a creative, collaborative thinker who arrives at her best ideas intuitively when she is completely in the moment or under the gun. She owns and curates the shop More & Co.and lives in a flat that was built in 1891 with her sweetheart, her baby girl and two cats.

SCB

Raised in a creative family in northern California, and based in Portland, Oregon for the last 15 years, Stephanie Congdon Barnes is a photographer and stylist who also works in the mediums of illustration, soft sculpture, and textiles. Stephanie has photographed for clients both big and small—from Starbucks to her daughter’s birthday party. She is always looking for new challenges and usually says yes to them. Stephanie lives with her husband, two children, one cat and one dog.

Our Project

We are MAV and SCB. We live 3191 Miles Apart in Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon. We have been collaborating for 10 years!

Here, we share a diptych and a few words every Friday. Our new book of photographs, stories, recipes and crafts, A Year Between Friends, is now widely available.